SEO (search engine optimization) is essential for driving traffic to your insurance agency’s website without relying on paid ads. A strong SEO strategy starts with keyword research—identifying the terms your ideal customers are searching for—so you can strategically incorporate them into your website’s content. In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of building a list of high-impact keywords and using them to boost your SEO rankings.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of narrowing down the terms online insurance buyers are searching for online. When a web page includes the right keywords, search engines take note and rank them online according to their relevancy. For example, if buyers in your region are searching for “umbrella insurance” and your agency offers it, you should use this term throughout your site. Otherwise, competitors already ranking for “umbrella insurance” will be listed higher on the SERP (search engine results page), making it more likely that buyers will click on their content.
Keyword research is the beginning of every great SEO project and should be the first step in creating new content for your site. Every piece of content should have a list of keywords in mind. But how do you go about building your list of high-impact keywords?
The Keyword Research Process
Before beginning your keyword research, you’ll want to land on a topic. This can be anything your agency offers, but it must be something online users are actively on the hunt for. Once you have chosen your topic, ask yourself “what would I search if I were an online consumer?”
How to Select the Right Search Terms
A quick way to start is to type search terms directly into a search engine and see what comes up. However, you’ll most likely want to choose a program which allows you to accurately track the performance of certain keywords in your area, like Conductor or Semrush. These programs allow you to view keyword opportunities or high-performing keywords you may not have present on your site and in your content.
Keywords can be virtually anything under the sun as long as they are relevant and worked correctly into your copy. You’ll want to avoid keywords that only consist of one word (“short-tail” keywords), like “insurance,” and put your focus on more specific, long-tail keywords, like “umbrella insurance Utah.”
When it comes to average monthly searches, you’ll want to aim for the lower average monthly searches (10, 70, 100, etc.). The higher the number, the stiffer the competition, so it is a best practice to start low.
Choose Quality Over Quantity
Every keyword must have an intent, and quality takes precedence over quantity in this case. You would think, “the more keywords, the better!”, but if site crawlers—determine your content is not relevant and instead oversaturated with keywords, your site could be categorized as unreliable and spammy. As long as your content is relevant and informative, however, site crawlers will rank your agency site appropriately. Tackle one topic at a time, and if possible, choose one primary keyword to represent your content’s purpose. You’ll also want to work these keywords naturally into your copy.
Keywords and Your TrustedChoice.com Profile
With an Advantage subscription, you get a team of SEO experts continuously updating web pages on TrustedChoice.com to maintain the site’s relevance, which also helps your agency profile get crawled daily by site crawlers. We also recommend you use keywords in the “About Us” statement of your Advantage profile to give both search engines and online consumers the full scope of your insurance agency.
TrustedChoice.com also gives you the ability to leverage our high domain authority score (20 points higher on average compared to other insurance sites) to offer agents a better likelihood of being recommended by search engines on the SERP.
While you’re busy optimizing your insurance agency site and content with keywords, we can tackle SEO for your profile. Get a leg-up online by finding the right subscription for your agency, and don’t miss out on the daily SEO boosts that keeps our independent agents ranking online.